Maja Hoffmann Fights to Build Her Cultural Capital in Arles, France

ARLES, France — It was 90 degrees at 10 p.m. as the lights dimmed on a stage under the exposed trusses of a 19th-century foundry. All was silent but for the humming of cicadas, all was still apart from the sultry breeze, and all was dark, except for the green flashing lights on the giant construction crane hovering overhead.

The crane, 200 feet high, loomed over a 10-story gnarled tower of steel and glass designed by the architect Frank Gehry. It is the centerpiece of Luma Arles, a $175 million arts complex built on a 15-acre plot of parched earth and defunct rail yard, known as the Parc des Ateliers. Visible from just about every vantage point in this low-lying Provençal landscape made famous by Vincent van Gogh, it is an ever-present reminder that the Swiss art patron Maja Hoffmann is busy transforming this city.

If you’re not one of the 35,000 residents of Arles or don’t run in art circles, it’s likely that you’ve never heard of Ms. Hoffmann. An heiress to the pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-La Roche, this art collector, benefactor and film producer (with a net worth of about $4.2 billion, according to Bloomberg), sits on the boards of half a dozen major museums and galleries, including the New Museum and the Swiss Institute in New York, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the Kunsthalle Zurich, but she prefers to remain out of the spotlight, behind the scenes.

Nevertheless, her influence is felt. “In French we would call her incontournable” — essential — said Simon de Pury, the art auctioneer and collector. “She is one of the most committed people to art and to culture that I have ever come across. She’s a rainmaker in the art world.”

Simon Castets, the director of the Swiss Institute, described her efforts, as chairwoman, to help the art organization find a new home on St. Marks Place, oversee its renovation, and lead a successful $5 million capital campaign as “central” and “tireless.”

But the most self-driven of all her projects is Luma Arles. “There came a moment 10 years ago when I made up my mind, and said I want to try to do production in Europe,” she said in an interview in her apartment in New York in August. “I wanted to put my activities into one place, to have more weight and meaning.”

This summer in Arles, it was easy to see the results: Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project was performing on the open-air stage. A major retrospective of British pop-artists Gilbert & George filled a massive former machine workshop. In La Grande Halle, there were installations of video by Arthur Jafa, photography by Lily Gavin, and a high-tech multicolored light work by Pipilotti Rist. Meanwhile, designers and scientists in the Luma Atelier were concocting innovative uses for local natural resources like the stems of the region’s famous sunflowers.

Instead of reveling in all this progress, Ms. Hoffmann seemed embattled when I met her in her East Village apartment. She was angry about an opinion piece in The Financial Times that described her project as “part of the trend for billionaires to circumvent donating to an institution” and rather “build the whole thing themselves.”

“It’s enough,” she said, seated at the head of a long polished wood table, wearing a regal red muumuu. “To be perpetually challenged is not interesting. The media, the people — it’s a perpetual scrutiny.” She added, “This is preventing me from moving ahead.”

Ms. Hoffmann is trying to transform Arles through art, much in the same way that the artist Donald Judd reimagined a town called Marfa in Texas, or the Dia Art Foundation rebuilt the upstate New York town of Beacon, using art as a draw and an economic engine. In doing so, Ms. Hoffmann has taken on a role that was once reserved for public officials and city planners: imagining the future and then building it.

Mr. Gehry’s tower, the future Arts Resource Center at Luma, is central to her goal, Ms. Hoffmann says. She envisions the center not as a static showcase of art, but a working environment where people can conduct research and create projects. It is also a symbol: Mr. Gehry’s gleaming titanium Guggenheim Bilbao is known worldwide as the landmark that helped an industrial port city in Spain reinvent itself through art, an impact known as the “Bilboa Effect.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Gehry said that his idea for Luma was to try to build “a painterly building,” to refer to van Gogh’s “Starry Night” over the Rhone, painted in Arles in 1888. He conceived of a facade made of 10,000 stainless steel panels that would reflect light and color from thousands of angles, so that its surface would shift, shimmer and change throughout the day. Mr. Gehry described Ms. Hoffmann as more of a collaborator than a client. “She acts surprisingly like an artist,” he said.

The ambitious plans for Luma have met with opposition over the years. She and Mr. Gehry had to revise the design for the tower to win the approval of the city. Ms. Hoffmann also had a public fight with the annual Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, which was, before Luma, the main cultural draw to Arles (with about 125,000 attendees this summer). Its former director, François Hebel, objected to the local government’s willingness to give Ms. Hoffmann control over the Parc des Ateliers, without mediating other public considerations, and he resigned in protest in 2014.

“To my great sadness all the public authority people who were in charge at the time just sort of gave up because they were impressed that there was such generosity and they didn’t know how to cope with it,” Mr. Hebel said in a recent telephone interview. “It sort of crippled people.”

Today, Ms. Hoffmann has a working relationship with the Rencontres, which uses some of the Parc des Ateliers’ space in the summer. Mayor Hervé Schiavetti of Arles, unlike his predecessor, is a fan. “As the project is now close to completion, I am very impressed,” Mr. Schiavetti said in an email. “The reality is exactly what I dreamed of. Arles has entered a new era of its long history, thanks to LUMA.”

When I visited, the complaints I heard from the townspeople were about the tower itself, which some felt didn’t fit in to the Arlesian landscape; others said that it was only for the art elite, not the residents.

Ms. Hoffmann waved away these objections. “Of course some people will say it’s not aesthetically what I like,” she said. “Some Paris people said, ‘Why do you destroy our ville de plouc’ which means ‘town of peasants’? I’m challenging this way of thinking, that’s for sure. But I’m more from there than they will ever be. It’s not like I want to put my tower in that town. I know the town. I want to produce opportunities for the people who are from there.”

Ms. Hoffmann believes that Luma will help Arles become less of a seasonal economy that is dependent on summer tourism, thus helping local businesses. Arles now has an unemployment rate of about 13 percent, higher than the national average of 9 percent. Mr. Schiavetti attributes a slight drop here, from July 2017 to July 2018, “to the number of jobs created by and around the Luma Foundation.”

The daughter of the ornithologist Luc Hoffmann, a scientist and co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund, Ms. Hoffmann moved with her family to this region, known as the Camargue, when she was a child, and went to school in Arles. Her father set up an ornithological station there, founded the Tour du Valat conservation center and became a leader in wetlands conservation.

“I’m first-generation,” she said. “I certainly did not try to do the same as my father, but I can of course find some parallels. You engage in the country where you live and you try to say what you think and what you believe in, and discuss it with people. You act along with your beliefs.”

After her father initiated plans to build the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, when he was in his 90s, she became an organizing force for the museum, which opened in 2013; she is now its president. She also bought and restored two historic buildings as boutique hotels, the newest being l’Arlatan, designed by the Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo; and she owns a Michelin-starred restaurant using locally grown produce, La Chassagnette.

Luma Arles is almost finished; its opening is scheduled for spring 2020. Still to be built is a 10-acre public park with a lake and 500 new trees: a symbol of rebirth, turning the parched earth into a verdant landscape. The last leg of this journey may prove to be the trickiest for Ms. Hoffmann, as she will certainly need to face more scrutiny.

She’d much rather focus on her work, though. “What’s important today is to continue to be creative,” she said. “I’m not saying I have answers, I’m just trying.”

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